Book Summary and Reviews of The Fisher Boy by Stephen H. Anable

The Fisher Boy by Stephen H. Anable

The Fisher Boy

by Stephen H. Anable

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  • Published:
  • May 2008, 236 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

A debut mystery set amid the clam shacks and craft shops, art galleries and nude beaches of Cape Cod Provincetown.

Spiraling from the tip of Cape Cod, Provincetown has long been a place of freedom, escape, diversity, and risk. A gay resort, an art colony, and a working fishing port, it is at once gritty and hedonistic, beautiful and complex.

Boston comic Mark Winslow arrives with his troupe of improv actors ready to break into the Provincetown club circuit. But the town and the region - seared by drought and caught in the culture war - are anything but peaceful this summer. Does the tall ship in the harbor bear an unusually large number of Scandinavian tourists? If not, who are the blond and ragged people insisting they are associated with it?

Then a public fight makes Mark the prime suspect in the grisly butchering of a Boston blueblood. Mark believes his choice is simple: find the killer or be charged with the crime.

Amid the clam shacks and craft shops, art galleries and nude beaches, undercurrents are pulling at the surface of normality, like riptides beneath seemingly calm water. Could the disappearance of a famous painter 80 years in the past - and the story of his masterpiece, The Fisher Boy - somehow lie at the center of the whirlpool of evil threatening to extinguish Mark’s life?

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Starred Review. A profusion of diverting red herrings and a clever twist involving Mark's parentage help keep the suspense high through to the surprising conclusion." - Publishers Weekly.

"A first-rate insider's tour of Provincetown, with tender gay love scenes and B&B vignettes. But the hyper-inflated plot could have used major paring, and the first-time novelist needs to ration his similes." - Kirkus Reviews.

This information about The Fisher Boy was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

Stephen H. Anable

Stephen H. Anable was born in Boston and graduated from Stanford and Harvard universities. His short fiction and essays have been published in magazines and anthologies. At various time during his life, he has been a standup comic, a journalist, an actor, a social worker, a scriptwriter, and the communications coordinator at a cemetery. He has two sons and lives in Massachusetts. The Fisher Boy is his debut novel.

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